Jetsun

This is something I have found to be true in my life. 'Will' can be in opposition to this sort of acceptance and can just be another form of denial of reality as you are always trying to get away from of where you are at. So 'will' can just be a form of resistance and whatever resists persists so it actually keeps you stuck. But it all depends on where you are at in your individual circumstances.

I will give a clearer quote from that book, basically what he is saying that people existing is self evident so to deny them is nihilism "If not finding objects when they are analysed meant that they did not exist, there would be no sentient beings, no Boddhisattvas, no Buddhas, nothing pure, and nothing impure. There would be no need for liberation; there would be no reason to meditate on emptiness. However it is obvious that persons and things help and harm, that pleasure and pain exist, that we can free ourselves from pain and happiness. It would be foolish to deny the existence of persons and things when we are obviously affected by them. The idea that persons and things do not exist is a denial of the obvious; it is foolish"

"There is nothing to be found that is the 'I', but this fact does not imply that the 'I' does not exist. How could it? That would be silly. The 'I' definitely does exist" - Dalai Lama - How to see yourself as you really are

Quite often people come to this board with health problems after practising Mantik Chai sexual qigong stuff, it seems quite common for things to go wrong with this sort of practice when they don't have a teacher.

I have been practising a form of Chod meditation recently, which is about visualising you dead, chopping your body up and turning it into food to feed demons, there is a watered down version of it in the book 'Feeding your Demons' which is quite an easy book to get hold of. The next step up is to go do the meditation in graveyards and morgues but I imagine that is more difficult in this day and age

I'm not there yet but I understand that there can come a time where you realise that it is good for you to have compassion for all people and it is good for all people for you to have compassion for them, so if everyone benefits then it is a wise thing to aim for.

I can believe it, the thing which impacted me deeply wasn't some sort of mind blowing out of world experience rather it was the grounded humanity of immediately feeling the sort of trust and relaxation with him which I only have with maybe a couple of close friends which I grew up with, it was incredible how I could feel that with a stranger. Afterwards I looked into other peoples accounts of meeting the Dalai Lama and so many say the same thing, that they feel like he is a dear close friend even though they met him for only a brief time of maybe a few minutes, it's quite remarkable.

This is something I experienced when I met the Dalai Lama, the power of Bodhicitta to palpably affect a room of people. I saw it's influence even on my father who is a scientist in the mould of Richard Dawkins who doesn't put any stock in Buddhism or any religion but I could see he was touched. I think even the most hard headed sleeping person will be affected on some level even if they are not aware of it by such a blessing as being touched by a genuine masters Bodhicitta, which can plant seeds of questioning in the mind of a persons ego centred consciousness which have the potential to shake things up a bit at some point down the line. For me it was like the ego witnessing a power far greater than anything it has ever produced but it's very nature is in complete opposition to how the ego goes about it's business, so it creates a sort of confusion to the ego which is hard to ignore or dismiss.

You might be interested in what G.I Gurdjieff says about ancient civilisations as he says that there have been many advanced civilisations in the past many of which had higher level of spiritual development than our current civilisation. He talks in his book 'Meetings with Remarkable Men' how he discovered a map of pre sand Egypt which had the Sphynx on the map indicating that is is much older than previously thought, this is something he said many years before those scientists started to talk about water erosion on it. The Sphynx is talked about as a form of 'objective art' ( http://www.octavearts.org.uk/objective_art2.htm http://www.octavearts.org.uk/objective_art.htm) which a form of art which is precisely built to have a definite teaching or esoteric understanding within it designed to submit information to people of later generations after all the oral and written wisdom of the builder civilisation is lost.

In 'Opening the Dragon Gate' Wan Liping talks about compassion quite a lot and it's relation to virtue, plus he had to learn much Buddhism as part of his training and if I rightly remember he said something along the lines that that Buddhism was talking about the same truths as Taoism but in a different way. So yeah I agree it is strange why he charges so much.

I don't know if the use of the word 'manifesting' was intended in this way this time but it is a popular term now because of the whole new age law of attraction stuff, but the issue of blame implied within that theory can be very harmful to people, for example Ken Wilber documents how when his wife got cancer she had to deal with lots of new age people telling her how she needs to take responsibility for attracting it and manifesting it but in the end that whole approach just caused her more pain and suffering before she died. Which is why I think that whole law of attraction stuff needs to be understood from a wider context and spiritual understanding of things like emptiness and a wider compassionate understanding, otherwise it can easily cause problems like guilt and blame, which is the problem of taking one spiritual law out of the context of wider teachings and emphasising it above others as it can cause more problems than it solves.

The Buddha gave different advice to everyone who came to see him depending on the mind of the person and the circumstances, which is why many of the scriptures contradict and why there are different schools of Buddhist thought. No-one here ever met the Buddha and got his wisdom personally suited for their own particular state of wisdom, so to take him as an an ultimate authority means going by a scripture which is a teaching for a particular person for a particular time, so in other words you are taking another mans advice and another mans medicine as your own, which carries great risk for you because one mans medicine can be another mans poison. Which is probably why the Buddha didn't write down any of his teachings to try to avoid this problem.

Bruce Frantzis has some good stuff such as Opening your energy gates and the Water Method, there was a really good interview with him on here a while back i'll try find it.

Does not being detached from the sense mean that you just stop clinging to and rejecting what is perceived by the senses, so there is more direct perception without the mind filtering reality so much with it's views and opinions about what is coming in. So you can see a beautiful woman without wanting to own her and you can witness intense suffering without turning your head and running away.

Dignified support when you are dying is all good, but you don't know when you are going to die and ultimately you are on your own when you come to leave your body and you don't know what is going to happen, there comes a point when no other human can help you in any way. I have heard all that matters then is your level of compassion, all your powers, attainments, and lineage support is all worthless.

How do you know that?

I have been doing many exercises and techniques which are all about opening up but I am finding it is hard to make progress because they leave me feeling too vulnerable and sensitive which in the end leads me to closing down when having to deal with the outside world. So I am starting to think your ability to open up must be in proportion to your personal power or your confidence in your ability to set boundaries and push people away. So there is a direct yin-yang relationship between your willingness to open and your personal power. What this signals to me is that it is useless to only focus on opening up on the yin side, you also need to cultivate the power and strength to push people away if they cross your boundaries while you are open and more vulnerable, so the more powerful you feel the more willing you are to open. If you live in a monastery I can imagine you can only focus on the yin side as you are in a protected environment like a second womb while you make progress, but most of us don't have that protection. Perhaps this is all just self evident to many people, early school stuff, but I see many many exercises for opening people up and oneness etc but not so many about personal power and separating yourself from others. I'm guessing this is where martial arts comes in but how relevant are the martial arts in this regard in the modern world? as the main threats now are less physical based as they were once in the past, rather it is more psychological now about handling emotional manipulation and dominance from other people, the attacks and threats you get from other people now are far more subtle and so you have to have power to protect yourself from say the dominating boss or the corporate psychopath rather than the person who is going to try steal your cow or physically attack you. So I feel training in how to be strong, have personal power and firm boundaries in human relationships is far more relevant now than martial arts but yet I don't see a lot of methods and training in this sort of personal power out there, but if anyone can direct me where to find such information or any techniques I would be most grateful. I have read a load of stuff on setting personal boundaries but most of it is life coach stuff and nlp and I feel there must be more juicy esoteric information out there about psychic self protection, boundaries and power.

What would happen if you met her anger with anger? I was just reading today about a shamanistic take on emotional exchanges and they were saying when two energies of the same sort meet they can cancel each other out which creates possibilities: "When someone becomes angry with you for example, you can use anger, not a personalized anger, but the BIG anger, to deflect their anger as well as your own. You can be angry simply at their anger, totally disassociating it from any specific thing...If you use anger aimed at the emotion of anger you will often find that an epiphany of sorts results. This will in effect create a void emotionally, and through that void you can see more clearly and in that void you can act with detachment in a way that allows you to move them away from the anger....The thing is, that opening not only creates a void, it creates a void which shows you where their anger connects in their energy to their patterns, just as it shows you how it connects in your own. In that moment you can use that knowledge destructively or constructively."

It's nothing to do with bigotry it's called skilful means, people like the Dalai Lama realise that the western mind is more scientific minded so the teaching is presented more in that manner and with fewer cultural trappings which could be a barrier for understandng. Yes guilt and shame are everywhere but the difference is that in Christian culture they look at a child and call him a sinner before he even knows how to talk, while in Buddhist culture they would say that child is a little Buddha. Plus all the ideas of burning in hell etc if you put a foot wrong all permeate western culture and psychology in many deep subtle ways even if most people aren't practising Christians any more. I never said Tibet was perfect I was saying that countries such as Bhutan are healthier psychologically than most western countries, you only have to look at the mental health statistics to see that. The world health organisation did a study where they found that in many third world developing countries you are twice as likely to recover from schizophrenia than you are in countries like the US despite the medical care, they said that was likely to do with the lack of stigma and shame around such problems and community support, plus we have double the levels of things like bipolar etc etc etc. I'm not talking about idolising Tibet rather recognising the sickness within our own culture.

I'm sure they have plenty of problems but there is not the levels of family disintegration and neurosis we have. Plenty of Tibetan Lama's have commented at how shocked they were when they came to the west about the levels of guilt and self hatred we suffer. My parents just got back from Bhutan recently and they say it is completely different there with far less fear, insecurity and aggression within communities, almost everyone they met was smiling and gave them things not accepting anything in return, whereas when I go into my town I feel like I am more likely to spat upon or assaulted than given anything for free. But you can't expect a teaching which works in country like Bhutan to transfer directly to the west with our different issues and hangups.

Buddhism has a clearer path than most other religions in my experience but that doesn't mean it is the best for the individual especially Westerners, as the teachings were mostly formed for the psyche of a particular set of people in the East, while the psyche of the modern Westerner is now very different. For example in Tibetan Buddhism there are many meditations for visualising other people as your mother and father and meditations on taking on your mothers suffering, but those sorts of meditations are not appropriate for many Westerners because so many people have fractured family relationships and problem childhoods, the psych wards are full of people who have taken on their parents pain, which is something which is not properly understood by many Tibetan Lama's as it is is outside of their cultural understanding. Also many of the meditation objects and gods in Tantra as so alien to the Western mind that they may not be as effective as they for natives, the author Rob Preece has written a book about his experiences with this called "The Psychology of Buddhist Tantra" and says that it may be better for Westerners to find more familiar objects to meditate on but with the same meaning as the Tibetan deities to really connect with them. At the moment there needs to be a great deal of skillful means for a proper transmission of Buddhism into the West, you can see how people like the Dalai Lama and others are trying to do this by stripping Buddhism down without so much baggage, but really at the moment Western Buddhism is an experiment and it is unclear at the moment whether it will flourish or fail.

I think I get what you are saying, it is good to embrace your weaknesses and vulnerability then in the end you have nothing to defend, yet I am not sure it is wise or a good thing to be vulnerable all of the time with all people, unless you feel complete confidence in your personal power to defend yourself if they attack you in some way. Without that power then you will end up feeling embittered and abused if they take advantage of your openness, but if you do have the power then you can choose to use it or not. But I feel many of us may need development in our power to gain that confidence. An example of what I mean from my own life is that a few years ago I started going to psychotherapy and at the same time I was meditating and doing stuff like that to try open me up, but I was not opening up in therapy no matter how much I wanted to embrace my vulnerability and no matter how much I meditated, but then one time I got angry at the therapist and basically showed that I could push him away and defend myself, then after that things progressed and I started to open up naturally. It took an embrace of my yang forces like aggression to open up my yin softer side, they seem to be in direct relation and proportion to each other. So now I am trying to find ways of taking this further so I can feel a degree of personal power and strength in all situations in life only then I think will there be the possibility to be heart open at will.